An investigation of Holtzclaw was not opened at that point, according to the lawsuit.

A former Oklahoma City police officer convicted of raping several women while he was on duty assaulted another woman who alerted police seven months before the first reported incident, an attorney for several victims said on Monday.

The city police knew of a complaint filed on Nov. 5, 2013 by Demetria Campbell against officer Daniel Holtzclaw months before other accusations began to emerge, said attorney Benjamin Crump, who represents seven of Holtzclaw's victims in a civil lawsuit amended on Friday to include Campbell's case. The original lawsuit was filed on Feb. 25.

An investigation of Holtzclaw was not opened at that point, according to the lawsuit.

Seven months after Campbell complained, Jannie Ligons came forward on June 18, 2014, after being sexually assaulted by Holtzclaw. Police then opened an investigation of Holtzclaw.

“Demetria Campbell was the first victim of this serial rapist with a badge,” Crump said at a news conference on Monday. “Oklahoma City knew exactly who he was and did nothing when she came forward. If they had done something about Demetria Campbell’s complaint, all these other rapes could have been avoided.”

Critics say legislation does not go far enough in country where violence at home is widely regarded a private matter.

A new law that makes domestic abuse a crime has come into effect in China.

It is hoped the legislation will encourage more victims to take their abusers to court in a country where violence at home is still widely regarded as a private matter.

The All-China Women's Federation estimates that nearly 25 percent of married women in China have experienced domestic violence. But the real figure is probably much higher, because reporting abuse is still rare - especially in the countryside.

"From today victims of domestic abuse will be able to go to court to seek a restraining order that could force the abuser to move out of the home. A judge will have 72 hours to make a ruling," Al Jazeera's China correspondent Adrian Brown reported.

"But critics say the legislation still doesn't go far enough, since it fails to outlaw marital rape and doesn't place enough emphasis on health and social services."The new law "prohibits all forms of domestic violence", which it defines as: "Physical, psychological and other harm inflicted by family members, including beating, restraint, injury or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, recurring verbal threats and abuse", according to Chinese state media.

The police are now required to intervene immediately when abuse is reported, to stop it at once and collect related evidence. Officers must also help victims obtain treatment and medical reports.

The flight, which travelled a distance of around 14,500 kilometre in close to 17 hours, was operated as part of International Women's Day celebrations.

Air India’s all women crew celebrating the proud moment before longest flight from Delhi to San Francisco. (Source: Air India/ Twitter)

National carrier Air India on Monday said it flew the “world’s longest” all-women operated and supported flight from the national capital to San Francisco.

The flight, which travelled a distance of around 14,500 kilometre in close to 17 hours, was operated as part of International Women’s Day celebrations.

The non-stop Delhi-San Francisco flight took off from Delhi on March 6.

“This year for the first time, on the world’s longest non-stop flight, entire flight operations from cockpit crew to cabin crew, check-in staff, doctor, customer care staff, ATC (air traffic control) and the entire ground-handling… were handled by women,” Air India said in a release.

Air India CMD Ashwani Lohani said it was a historic flight and “the longest operated by all-women crew”. “The airline has immense respect for women and it is a symbol of women empowerment,” he added.

The flight was under the command of Kshamta Bajpayee and Shubhangi Singh, along with First Officers Ramya Kirti Gupta and Amrit Namdhari.

ABSENCES, by award winning filmmaker Tatiana Huezo (The Tiniest Place), exposes the ever-intensifying phenomenon of enforced disappearance in Mexico. A boy and his father disappear one morning, snatched off the road by armed men. Left behind, alone with her daughter, Lulu, a victim who refuses to give in, decides to tell the unacceptable story: the unfillable void, the absence of loved ones, the unanswered questions and the suffocating silence. After 5 years, absence has her living in a limbo that gives way to desire, hope and the struggle to find her 9-year old son Brandon and her husband, alive. This hauntingly beautiful short film illuminates the way disappearance affects women, and broadens our awareness on disappearance and its social consequences in Mexico and Central America. More.Guanajuato International Film Festival, Best Mexican Short Film Award

It felt as if, for the first time in history, the gender playing field at the high court was finally leveled, and as a consequence the court’s female justices were emboldened to just ignore the rules. Time limits were flouted to such a degree that Chief Justice John Roberts pretty much gave up enforcing them. I counted two instances in which Roberts tried to get advocates to wrap up as Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor simply blew past him with more questions. There was something wonderful and symbolic about Roberts losing almost complete control over the court’s indignant women, who are just not inclined to play nice anymore.

Abstract: We examined social and physical violence experienced by American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) women in prostitution and their impacts on the mental and physical health of 105 women (81%Anishinaabe, mean age = 35 years) recruited through service agencies in three Minnesota cities. In childhood, abuse, foster care, arrests, and prostitution were typical.

Homelessness, rape, assault, racism, and pimping were common. The women’s most prevalent physical symptoms included muscle pain, impaired memory or concentration, and headaches.

Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociation were common, with more severe psychological symptoms associated with worse health. Most of the women wanted to leave prostitution and they most often identified counseling and peer support as necessary to accomplish this. Most saw colonization and prostitution of AI/AN women as connected.

Two men have been found guilty for enslaving indigenous women in Sepur Zarco in a case symbolising a wider battle for Latin America women.

The word muxuk refers to a woman who has been “desecrated”, a woman whose “social and spiritual world was destroyed and broken in all of the areas of her life”. In the Q’eqchi’ language there are four ways to refer to sexual violence, yet muxuk is the term Guatemalan women of the Sepur Zarco community have chosen to use when talking about the war crimes perpetrated against them.

Neither Spanish nor English have the words to describe precisely the horrors these women experienced in 1982, during the Guatemalan armed conflict.

After decades of impunity, two former soldiers – base commander Esteelmer Reyes Girón and paramilitary Heriberto Valdez Asij – have been found guilty of crimes against humanity. On Friday, the high-risk court in Guatemala City sentenced them to a total of 360 years in prison for their crimes including the sexual enslavement of women.

The additional problem is that Francis appears ambivalent on the issue of clerical sex abuse. It took 10 months of private badgering by O’Malley before he agreed to set up the commission. Several of those close to Francis have told me that though he has a detestation of abuse, he is also wary of false accusations being made against priests.

That may explain why it took him over two years to accept the resignation of the US bishop Robert Finn in Kansas City after his 2012 criminal conviction for failing to report a paedophile priest to the police. Commission members called for Finn’s removal but it was almost three years after Finn’s criminal conviction before Francis authorised action.

Excerpt: In last two weeks, global events show that Pope Francis is enabling the clerical sex abuse of children by appointing, promoting and refusing to remove bishops with terrible histories of aiding and abetting abuse and by refusing to make meaningful change.

Excerpt: The Trafficking Victims Protection and Justice Act can absolutely be a game changer. But, like any law, it makes no difference if it is not enforced. And this is a significant task.

Sarah's experience with our criminal justice system signals a need for change.

Specifically, we need widespread police training not only about the new law, but the complexity of exploitation and best practices for prevention. Police departments must continue to shift perspectives on prostitution.

The Zika epidemic demonstrates how abortion restrictions are not only sexist and undemocratic, but also fundamentally racist and classist.
In addressing the Zika epidemic, several governments in Latin America made headlines in the past few months when they instructed their female citizens to avoid pregnancy altogether, amounting to what some scholars believe to be historic declarations. In Colombia, women were cautioned to prevent pregnancy for the next six to eight months, while the government of El Salvador — where abortion is illegal — advised women to wait at least two years before trying to conceive. Given the troubling nature of such calls, reflected in the reality that 58 percent of reported pregnancies in Latin America and the Caribbean are unintended, and the fact that some of these countries have among the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, the issue of reproductive justice must be placed at the center of this emerging conversation.

According to Loretta J. Ross, the co-founder and National Coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, reproductive justice is “about three interconnected sets of human rights: (1) the right to have children, (2) the right not to have children, and (3) the right to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments.”

Race and class ultimately shape the fulfillment of these three interconnected human rights. In the case of Zika, poor, rural women are the most affected by the virus, so much so that the Colombian human rights activist Mónica Roa of the women’s rights organization Women’s Link Worldwide reported that she heard someone call Zika “the mosquito of the poor.” Poorer women and women living in the countryside do not readily have as much access to contraceptives, while the more expensive emergency contraceptives are altogether banned in some countries like Honduras. Meanwhile, the poorest sectors of Latin America cannot afford air-conditioned housing like their wealthier counterparts and often live near areas with standing water that functions as breeding grounds for the mosquitos.

Police guard the front door of Excel Industries in Hesston, Kansas, where a gunman opened fire on Thursday.

An ex-girlfriend of the Kansas shooter told police earlier this month that he was violent and needed psychological help.

Cedric Ford was at work at an Excel plant in Hesston, Kansas, on Thursday afternoon when he was handed a piece of paper: The Harvey County Sheriff’s office had served him with a protection from abuse order.

Ford’s ex-girlfriend had filed the protective order, which stemmed from an alleged domestic violence incident earlier this month.

On Feb. 5, according to the Wichita Police Department, officers responded to a call at the home of Ford's ex-girlfriend and took a report of domestic violence. She told police that Ford assaulted her, but he had already left the scene when they arrived.

That same day, she filed for a protection order to bar Ford from contacting her or visiting her home. She told authorities that Ford was violent and unstable, according to court documents obtained by The Huffington Post.

This paper examines the current state of knowledge on the impact of domestic and family violence (DFV) on parenting. It considers how often DFV occurs among parents; the impact of DFV on parenting; the methods and behaviours used by perpetrators to disrupt the mother-child relationship; and interventions used to strengthen and support a healthy mother-child relationship.

The paper finds that approximately one third or more of parents in the general community experience DFV, but there is limited evidence on DFV among marginalised parent populations such as Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD), rural, disabled and same-sex parents. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men, women and children suffer considerable DFV, but the true prevalence of abuse among parents is hard to determine due to a lack of reporting, limited screening for DFV, and methodological issues.

Most evidence suggests that DFV during pregnancy can result in poor pregnancy outcomes and reduced attachment. It also impacts on an abused woman’s ability to parent effectively; women will attend to their abusive partner’s demands and needs, and control and discipline children to keep them safe. Attachments/relationships can improve over time, and parenting and child health outcomes also improve once DFV stops.

There is limited information on the parenting style of abusive fathers, but researchers and victims have characterised them as authoritarian, under-involved, self-centred and manipulative. They aim to isolate, control and undermine women’s authority to parent and have meaningful relationships with their children. The paper recommends supportive care for mothers experiencing DFV and their children as an alternative to reporting all DFV to child protection services.

Home visiting programs have been shown to be effective in reducing child maltreatment, improving parenting skills and children’s behaviour, but not necessarily effective in preventing or reducing DFV. New programs with an additional DFV focus are currently being assessed. Victims of abuse need more intense and targeted therapy; the paper recommends psychotherapeutic interventions with combined mother-child sessions as they have shown good results. Interventions with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families show client satisfaction but are yet to show other effective outcomes.

THE ROOM OF BONES follows the passage of four mothers in the Institute for Legal Medicine as they search for their children’s remains in the midst of three decades of social violence in El Salvador. Across Mexico and Central America, the last twenty years have been plagued by a meteoric and troubling rise in desaparecidos, or missing persons. Mass murder has become all too common, and the identity of the perpetrators remains unknown as the relationship between governments, gangs, and other criminal organizations is shrouded in mystery. As civil and legal systems have failed to thoroughly investigate the crisis, families of victims are left to seek closure and justice on their own. Salvadoran filmmaker Marcela Zamora profiles a group of forensic anthropologists in her home country tasked with the noble but gruesome work of unearthing human remains and matching them with names of desaparecidos. The result is a harrowing portrait of a region in crisis.

More than 20,000 people disappeared in Mexico during the horrifically violent war on drugs waged by former President Calderon. With each missing person, a family is left behind in a desperate search to get answers from a government that is suspiciously ambivalent. Putting a human face on the most harrowing of statistics, director Alicia Calderon courageously captures the stories of three mothers - Natividad, Guadalupe, and Margarita - as they search for their children who have gone missing. One mother constantly retraces the last steps of her son, combing empty fields for his body; another travels all the way to Washington, DC, to plead for US intervention; and the last simply tries to forget the emptiness and raise her now-motherless grandson. In one of the most powerful documentaries about the human casualties of the Mexican narco-wars, these women’s stories are among the many that stand for truth and justice for the 26,000 missing people in Mexico today. With their lives now completely devoted to seeking out the truth, they pursue any avenue possible, in the face of an indifferent government which considers their loved ones to be "collateral casualties" of the drug war.

In order to determine the effectiveness of efforts to counter human trafficking at the State level, this study examined the impact of various relevant State laws, the effectiveness of prosecutorial strategies for obtaining convictions of traffickers under these laws, and ways to increase public awareness and expectations regarding the countering of human trafficking.

Abstract:

State laws that increase the fiscal and bureaucratic support for anti-trafficking enforcement have increased arrests for human trafficking. Laws that mandate data collection on human trafficking or the reporting of human trafficking have had minimal effect. Most States have criminalized human trafficking, but have not increased their fiscal support or civil remedies to counter human trafficking. It is more important that State human trafficking legislation be comprehensive across all categories rather than being harsh in only one category. Requiring the National Human Trafficking Hotline number to be posted in public places is the most important provision for increasing the number of human trafficking arrests, although this has not been linked to increased prosecutions for human trafficking. The creation and support of task forces to counter human trafficking are the strongest predictors of both State prosecutions of human-trafficking suspects as well as suspects for other types of targeted criminal offenses. Civil provisions are less effective in predicting human-trafficking arrests and prosecutions than State investment measures; safe harbor and civil actions are two civil remedies that strongly predict arrest and prosecutions. When becoming aware of the nature of human trafficking, the public is concerned, but they see no connection between their own attitudes and behaviors and whether they impact human trafficking. This analysis includes an examination of factors that have impacted the outcomes of specific cases of human trafficking.15 tables, 14 figures, 29 references, and appended study instruments

Texas may soon classify two immigration detention centers as “child-care facilities” to circumvent a judge’s 2015 ruling that ordered them shut down. A new rule submittedto the state’s Health and Human Services Commission would create a new category of child-care license that would keep family detention centers open in Karnes City and Dilley that currently house migrant women and their children caught crossing the Mexican border.

The rule has been in the works since September, as the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services grappled with a decision from federal Judge Dolly Gee that came down in July. Gee ruled that the country’s three family detention centers (the third, which is currently being shut down, is in Pennsylvania) release the children they were hold in “deplorable conditions” that “failed to meet even the minimal standard” for a safe and clean environment for children.

The subpar conditions, she wrote, violated 1997’s Flores v. Meese settlement agreement, a class action suit that set standards for how unaccompanied migrant children stopped at the border should be treated—namely, that they must be held in licensed facilities. Gee’s decision applied that standard to children apprehended with their parents, too. At the time, there were about 1,400 children and parents in the country’s three family detention centers.

The executive directors of the National Network of Abortion Funds and the Abortion Care Network discuss the challenges and opportunities they have faced so far as leaders of abortion access organizations in the context of one of the most hostile cultural and political climates since the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. (Yamani Hernandez / Nikki Madsen)

In this exchange, Yamani Hernandez, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, and Nikki Madsen, executive director of the Abortion Care Network, discuss the challenges and opportunities they have faced so far as leaders of abortion access organizations in the context of one of the most hostile cultural and political climates since the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

The two leaders also highlight the importance of working across movements to build momentum around expanding abortion care. “In order to rise above the challenges that 2016 will surely present, we will need to continue to work with and alongside movements like Black Lives Matter and Fight for $15, in addition to lifting up abortion care providers and seekers across the country,” said Hernandez.

Madsen added: “Working in partnership and building bridges across movements for health, rights, and justice, and prioritizing the voices and needs of those who face the greatest injustice, will create the kind of robust and broad movement that may finally be effective in confronting the root of our collective oppression, and actually achieve the goal of true reproductive justice.”

The Vatican on Monday announced a new series of policies and projects following a weeklong assembly of a commission aimed at preventing child sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. But the ousting from the Pope Francis–appointed panel of one of its most outspoken members has cast doubt on its commitment to reform.

The Vatican's press statement did not mention its decision on Saturday to suspend Peter Saunders, a survivor of clergy abuse who had been enlisted to join the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. Critics say the controversy, which comes amid widespread scrutiny of the appointment of a Chilean bishop accused of concealing abuse, is only the latest example of the church's continued need for increased accountability and external oversight.

"This notion that the church needs new policies and panels and procedures and protocols—it's really just smart PR, but it's also very, very, very disingenuous," said David Clohessy, a survivor of clergy abuse and founder of the national support and advocacy group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. The commission's efforts "on paper look great," he said. "It's just that they're never enforced."